Connoisseurly sensibility and discrimination developed among critics and collectors, and the importance of drawings in appreciating an individual artist's work began to be recognised.

[The gallant monarch] like an eagle o'er his eyrie towers, / To souse annoyance that comes near his nest.

For 5-year-intervals (referred to in the following as “quintades” in analogy to decades) there is a marked drop of absolute and relative publications frequencies since the 1990s with a maximum of 4.2 % in the quintade 1985–1989 and the minimum of 1.6 % in 2010–2014 (see Fig. 1).

This was none of your stand-up, wafery, bread and butter teas, but a thorough-going, sit-down supper […]